Maggie Shayne - Sleep with the Lights On

The thing was to stockpile the morphine before it got that bad. Then give it to them all at once when it gets too horrible to bear. It would have been merciful.

That had been, Mason realized, the first time he’d ever considered that doing something illegal might be justified. The day he’d watched his brother blow himself away had been the second—and that time he’d actually acted on the thought.

Jeremy sniffed. The sound jerked Mason out of his dark thoughts, and he looked over at his sixteen-year-old nephew. Built like a scarecrow. He’d grown a couple of inches over the summer, let his hair grow out. It was brown, curly. He attempted the comb-it-all-forward look currently the rage, but it curled at the ends in a flip that ruined the effect.

Jeremy was not doing well. He looked like a zombie.

Marie was a blond-haired blue-eyed rock, standing between her son Josh and mother-in-law, Angela. She had an arm around Josh, more to get him to stop fidgeting than to comfort him, but still. The other hand rested atop her baby bump. Her eyes were wet and a little puffy, but she’d done her hair and makeup, and she was holding it together in spades. For the boys, he figured. He and Marie had not always seen eye to eye, but he thought she was a hell of a mother. His nephews were lucky to have her.

His own mother, Angela, was standing there looking blank. She was medicated. He could tell. She had one of those doctors that only the wealthy or well-connected could afford, the kind who would pretty much prescribe whatever she asked for and look the other way when her usage seemed to be getting over the top.

As for himself, he was a wreck, too. And not just because he kept expecting the whole mess to blow up in his face at any second. Someone would find out what Eric had done—and what Mason had done to cover it up. It had to happen. That was hell to deal with on top of mourning the brother he’d thought he had, while trying to make sense out of the one he now knew had been real. The two images didn’t mesh. Yes, Eric had been fucked up for most of his life, but Mason had always seen him more as the victim of some screwy personality disorder—social anxiety or whatever—than as a criminal.

Murderer, he corrected.

Serial killer, he corrected again.

No matter how often he adjusted the label in his mind, he couldn’t seem to make it stick. His memory of his brother kept going straight back to “poor, mixed-up Eric, he’s so awkward with people, so painfully shy, so uncomfortable in his own body.”

Yeah, the family was a mess. Of them all, he figured Josh was doing the best.

The priest finished up, noting that there would be a gathering at Angela’s home afterward, and that they were all welcome to stop by and pay their respects.

Mason knew it was part of the whole ritual of parting, but he honestly didn’t know if he could get through it. People began to wander up to the five of them, offering hugs, handshakes, platitudes. And there would be more of the same into the evening, he knew, at his mother’s brick Georgian with its perfectly manicured lawn in Binghamton’s upscale suburb of Endwell. Uncomfortable people with empty words and filled casserole dishes.

Turning, he looked at the boys. “You guys wanna ride back with me instead of in the limo?”

Jeremy looked at his mother, then turned back and shook his head no, though Mason could tell he wanted to say yes. “We’d better stick with Mom.”

“Good man. I’ll be right behind you, then, okay?”

“I’d like to ride with you, Mason,” Angela said, and she closed a hand on his upper arm, digging in with her nails, though he didn’t think she meant to. “If you don’t mind.”

He was surprised how much his mother was leaning on him. She weighed next to nothing, and yet her hand on his arm seemed to be holding most of that weight up. It was alarming enough that he rearranged her, sliding his arm around her shoulders, and helped her down the grassy slope to the dirt track where several cars were lined up as their owners climbed back inside.

Marie and the boys slid into their limo, Marie having to turn her back to the open door and lower herself in carefully. She was going to have that little girl in a few months. Mason thought about that, about her and the boys having something joyful to take the place of the pain and grieving. And then he thought more. His brother was a serial killer. Was it genetic? Eric being adopted, his own forebears were a mystery. But could the gene be alive, even now, in one of the boys, or in the baby on the way?

The limo pulled away. He watched it go, then finally opened the passenger door of his car for his mother. She got in, he closed it and went around, got in his own side. As he pulled away, she blinked her glassy eyes and said, “You’ll need to make even more effort than before with Marie and the boys, you know.”

He nodded. “They’ll need me. I know, Mother.”

“Eric was our link to them. We can’t let Marie start pulling them away from us.”

“She would never do that.”

“She’s angry. I know you don’t see that, but I do. I’m a woman. I was his mother. She blames me.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

She was quiet for a moment. He pulled out of the cemetery, onto the road. It was a beautiful day, too beautiful to spend it among the dead.

“You’re a policeman, Mason. I never wanted that for you, never understood why you wanted it—but it’s what you are. I expect you to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this.”

He glanced sideways at her and didn’t bother going into the old argument. He’d decided to be a cop when his best friend’s kid brother had been murdered by his babysitter. “To the bottom of what, Mother?”

She shot him a How can you ask me that? look. “This,” she said. Then she shook her head hard. “He didn’t just shoot himself. He couldn’t have. Not my Eric.”

He started to speak, then pressed his lips together to keep the words inside. His mother knew the circumstances of his brother’s death. He didn’t need to tell her again that he’d walked in on the suicide-in-progress. She knew. She’d insisted on reading the reports. She’d been high on prescriptions ever since.

“Mother, you know he did.”

“I know, I know, I—” She fluttered a hand in the air. “I mean there had to be a reason. I’ve been asking Marie about things—their finances and so on—and she says they’re fine, but I know better. Honestly, if it had become that bad, why wouldn’t he just have asked...?” Her voice trailed off as she slowly shook her head. “Maybe he borrowed from the...the wrong people.”

“He didn’t borrow. Their finances were fine. Marie didn’t lie to you.”

“Drugs, then.” She said it almost hopefully. “Maybe he was on some sort of drugs that—”

“He wasn’t on drugs, Mother.” Ironically, she was, but prescriptions, as she so often reminded him, were not really drugs. They were drugs, but not, you know, drugs.

Mason took a breath. She wasn’t going to let go of this. “Eric had...problems. You know that.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not problems. He was a quiet boy. Scared. But that’s natural, of course. Six years old, coming to a new country, a whole new family, learning a new language. We don’t even know what happened to his birth family in Russia.” She lowered her head again. “We never asked him, you know.”

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